This invention relates to a method and apparatus for testing a broadband internet connection, in particular, but not limited to, the suitability of the broadband internet connection for providing access point base station services.
An access point base station is a cellular base station designed for use in residential or small office environments. A user's mobile phone communicates with the access point base station with a radio transmission, and the access point base station connects to a broadband internet connection in the home or office which it then uses as a two-way communications path to the cellular operator's core network.
There are several advantages to using an access point base station service. 3 G suffers from inadequate indoor signal penetration, leading to poor coverage in an indoor environment, which is where mobile phone users are believed typically to spend two-thirds of their time. Poor coverage diminishes the quality of voice and video applications and slows down high-speed data services. Dropped calls, poor video quality and time-consuming downloads lead to user dissatisfaction, as they expect high quality of service. They may resort to using their land-line phones or switch to other cellular operators in the hope of better quality of service including clearer voice calls, clearer video images and faster downloads.
The use of an access point base station in the home or office improves the radio coverage and capacity of a cellular network, and also increases the potential for new cellular services. Furthermore, the use of an access point base station reduces investment requirements in the macro radio cellular infrastructure.
When using a home back haul connection, an access point base station typically shares the bandwidth of the connection with other active services on that connection. For example, these may include services such as Internet Browsing, On-line Gaming Sessions, Video-on-Demand, IPTV, Peer-to-peer file sharing sessions and potentially a whole host of other services or activities. It is important that the broadband internet connection is capable of handling the data sent by the access point base station in a fast and accurate manner. This is particularly important for cellular services such as voice and video calling, where a delay or degradation of the signal results in the call failing or not being understood.
It will be appreciated that the usage profile of one individual premises and the associated broadband internet connection when compared to another individual premises and broadband internet connection can vary greatly. Furthermore, the underlying quality of the broadband internet connection can vary considerably, in dependence on such factors as allocated bandwidth (Mb/s), distance from the exchange, age of the copper in the ground, internet service provider traffic management policies, network load by time-of-day and the efficiency of routing in the network path from the customer premises to the core network.
Any or all of these elements combined may create a situation where the broadband internet connection is not suitable for access point base station service, leading to an unsatisfactory performance as mentioned above. In such shared-bandwidth approaches, which are the majority of designs currently being developed, the detrimental effect on the quality of access point base station delivered services could be such as to make a deployment unfeasible.